Rip Van:dorm-roomstroopwafels hedrove to Starbucks
Rip Pruisken grew up in the Netherlands eating stroopwafels off the top of a warm mug, the steam softening the caramel inside. He carried an armful to Brown University, started making them at 3am in his dorm with Marco De Leon, and sold them for a dollar on the campus green. They slept in a Volvo to deliver them cross-country. Today they are in Starbucks.
Rip Van started with homesickness and a very specific snack. Rip Pruisken grew up in the Netherlands, where the stroopwafel is a small ritual: you rest one on top of a warm mug of coffee or tea and let the steam soften the caramel pressed between its two thin waffle layers. It is the taste of a Dutch afternoon.
When Pruisken came to Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, he brought an armful of stroopwafels with him. They did not last. His friends and classmates ate through them almost immediately and wanted more, which is the kind of signal most people miss and a founder notices. There was clearly demand for a thing nobody in America was making.
He was not trying to start a company. He was trying to share a snack from home, and could not make them fast enough.
So he started making them himself. By his junior year, Pruisken and his co-founder Marco De Leon were hand-pressing hundreds of stroopwafels at three in the morning in their dorm room, a Willy Wonka operation run on no sleep, then selling them for a dollar each on the university's main green. In the company's own words, they sold out. Every time.
Selling out a 300-piece batch in an hour, over and over, is the kind of proof you cannot argue with. The campus green was a free, brutal test market, and the wafels passed it every week. They funded the leap with Kickstarter and turned the 3am hobby into an actual company.
The early growth was not glamorous. After they officially launched in 2012, Pruisken and De Leon loaded inventory into a Volvo station wagon and drove across the country to put their wafels into stores by hand, sleeping in the car to save money along the way. They named the brand Rip Van, a nod both to Pruisken's own name and to Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle.
It was the un-scalable, founder-does-everything phase that most brands either skip or never survive. They spent two years close to the product, improving the recipe and the packaging, learning what a stroopwafel had to become to live on an American shelf instead of on top of a Dutch coffee cup.
From a dorm-room bake sale to the Starbucks counter.
The goal stopped being "a Dutch snack in America" and became "the stroopwafel, rebuilt for how people want to snack now."
In 2016 Rip Van launched nationally in Starbucks, and both founders landed on the Forbes and Inc 30 Under 30 lists. Then they did the harder thing: in 2019 they reformulated the wafel to be genuinely better-for-you, cutting the sugar down to three grams and adding fiber, without losing the caramel-and-waffle reason anyone bought it in the first place. The homesick snack had become a real better-for-you brand.
Reformulating the one thing people already love is the riskiest move a snack brand can make. The original wafel had landed in Starbucks at roughly fourteen grams of sugar, and the whole appeal was that it tasted like an indulgence. Pulling that down toward three grams meant changing the exact bite that built the brand, and getting it wrong does not lose you a feature, it loses you the customer. Pruisken has said the work "took a decent amount of time initially because we really wanted to figure out how to position the product," moving through twelve grams, then nine, then three, sweetening with monk fruit, over years rather than one bold relaunch.
Underneath that sits a colder bet. Rip Van is wagering that better-for-you can win at price parity, that a shopper paying two to five dollars for a candy bar will pay the same for something low in sugar, and the brand leans on direct sales to test new products precisely because shelf space punishes a miss ("if it doesn't work, you're not saddled with so much inventory"). One beloved recipe, a category that wants novelty, and a retail channel that is unforgiving about inventory. The dorm-room hustle was the easy part.
The stroopwafel, with three grams of sugar
The Dutch Caramel & Vanilla wafel, the modern version of the snack Pruisken grew up on: the same two thin waffle layers and soft caramel center, now built with just three grams of sugar and added fiber. It is the thing he could not make fast enough in a dorm room, reformulated for an American shelf and a Starbucks counter.
Rip Van, in five moments
The arc
- The NetherlandsRip Pruisken grows up on stroopwafels, rested on a warm mug so the steam softens the caramel inside.
- BrownHe brings an armful to university, his friends devour them, and the demand is obvious.
- ~2010He and Marco De Leon hand-make wafels at 3am in their dorm and sell 300 an hour on the campus green, selling out every time.
- 2012They launch officially, fund it on Kickstarter, and drive cross-country in a Volvo, sleeping in the car, to get wafels into stores.
- 2016 to 2019Rip Van goes national in Starbucks, both founders make 30 Under 30, and they reformulate the wafel down to three grams of sugar.
Every hard call Rip Van has made traces back to the same refusal to do the snack halfway. Pruisken would not serve friends a worse stroopwafel than the one he grew up on, so he made them by hand at 3am. He would not fake the distribution, so he slept in the Volvo. And when the easy version of the brand was already in 12,000 Starbucks, he would not leave the recipe alone, because a snack people loved was not yet a snack that was good for them. Cutting fourteen grams of sugar to three without losing the caramel was a bet that the harder product would outlast the nostalgic one. The craving got him started. The unwillingness to fake it is what made it durable.
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